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Making the Bard fun for kids? That’s childsplay

Our critic enjoys energy, wit and seagulls on sticks as children take to the stage in the Schools’ Shakespeare Festival

Libby Purves

July 9 2010, 1:01am, The Times

A production of Henry V at the Shakespeare Schools Festival, West Yorkshire Playhouse, LeedsBob Collier/Duncan Raban

On Mondays the cast of the Michael Jackson tribute musical Thriller get a night off. But this Monday, the Lyric on Shaftesbury Avenue was not dark; its stage taken over by dozens of schoolchildren storming through miniature Shakespeare plays and soliloquies. An assured young Muslim girl in a white hijab was Hamlet, her fierce meditative pauses holding the rowdy audience silent. A special school mobbed hilariously through Twelfth Night, and a 1920s Comedy of Errors from Harrogate interpreted the twin Dromios as Charlie Chaplins and made artful and energetic use of a property door on wheels controlled by two upstagingly saucy maids.

It was the tenth anniversary festival of SSF: the Schools’ Shakespeare Festival, a charity that both in and out of the classroom has…